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Americans! Congratulations on joining the rest of the civilised world with your Spotify accounts. You now have instant access to almost every song ever written and worth listening to, and also country and western. (And if you don’t have an invite yet, don’t worry – you’ll get one soon.)

But what are you going to listen to? How about some gaming soundtracks… like these!

Gray Matter: Jane Jensen’s latest adventure game, and a pleasant soundtrack courtesy of husband Robert and effective family band The Scarlet Furies. (Watch out for a nasty spoiler in the track listing if you’re planning to play this one at some point though.)

Hitman 2: Annoyingly, Jesper Kyd’s other soundtracks – including the terrific Assassin’s Creed 2 one – seem to have been taken off the service in recent months. This one remains though, and is a solid introduction to why he’s a great composer.

Fallout 3: As with every game that uses licensed tunes, you can find an official complication, or simply a collection of the same songs. For Fallout 3, try Songs of Wasteland, and Songs From The Mojave Wastelands for New Vegas. Alternatively, get more of the same style in the oddly named Music Inspired By Fallout 3 & New Vegas. I wonder if people like Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington knew they were being inspired by a post-apocalyptic RPG…

Bioshock 2: And speaking of them, here’s a similar selection for this most underrated of sequels. The Boogie Man and Nightmare are particularly good listening.

GTA IV: To get that official Liberty City feel, set your fake-radio for Vladivostok FM, home to songs like Schweine that instantly stick in your head whether you like it or not. You can also get the main themes and Liberty City Invasion, featuring the ‘tunes’ of no doubt fine gentlemen with names like ‘Busta Rhymes’. I’m sure they’re awfully funky.

Play! A Video Game Symphony Live: Lots of famous tunes, played by an actual orchestra. World of Warcraft, Oblivion and Guild Wars are the ones you can listen to without shame, along with some others bearing names like ‘Sonic The Hedgehog’ and ‘Castlevania’.

Video Games Live: And the same goes for here, with Myst and Advent Rising joining the pack, along with some other console game favourites.

Mafia 2: A collection of licensed tunes put together by fans, but no worse for it.

Pac Man Fever: Words… words cannot describe this one. Just put your special toe-curling socks on and click play. You’ll want to click stop, but won’t be able to.

Adventure Quest: Well… kindof. The singer Voltaire apparently did a guest starring role in this RPG, and here are some game variants of his songs – Day of the Dead, Tempest, This Ship’s Going Down, To The Bottom of the Sea, and When You’re Evil. Disturbingly catchy.

Dead Space 2: Dead space, but not dead air. Top marks for less-than spooky track names like “Much Ado About Necromorphs” and “It Had To Be Unitology”.

Crysis 2: Because if you’re going to hire Hans Zimmer, you may as well put out a soundtrack. Or three. Here’s Be Fast to go with it, and Be The Weapon, both painfully wasting the chance to call the disc “MAXIMUM ROCK”.

Age of Conan: A truly meaty DOUBLE DISC bag of music. Or what would be double-discs, if such things weren’t so last century.

Dreamfall: And speaking of last century, here’s an adventure game. (Disclaimer: This flippant comment here purely to get a rise out of John.)

LA Noire: Okay, so it’s not a PC game yet, but it’s going to be one – unlike Red Dead Redemption (which is also on Spotify, but must go without the honour of a link). The game itself is a little… mixed… but there’s no arguing that the soundtrack is excellent. Unlike many open world games, you get original stuff on the soundtrack too, not just licenses.

Have we missed any good ones? Link them in a comment. And just to be on the safe-side – these are all live and working right now in the UK, but licensing being a stupid, silly thing, we can’t guarantee they’ll be equally available everywhere.

I’m surprised how little this is known but i personally prefer to use Grooveshark as an alternative to Spotify. Works through a browser, has a huge variety and the adds are just banners to the right side, not intrusive breaks in your listening.http://www.grooveshark.com

FYI – the Mirror’s Edge soundtrack is not available in the U.S.
At the moment the best we Americans can do is the “Still Alive – Paul van Dyk Mix” track from the promotional remixes album: link to open.spotify.com

There are a lot of un-civilized countries in the world. I’m living in one of them. However, there are other services which do the same thing, but on a P2P base. (Streaming, not plain old download-pirating.) I’m never sure if those don’t get shut off one of these days or, one might say, jump the shark in a groovy way, but until then, I’m perfectly happy without Spotify.
PS Is the VVVVVV soundtrack, PPPPPP not on there? If it is, you should totally mention it.

And the selection kinda sucks, and mostly it has about five rotating episodes of any show it actually has episodes for, and the paid subscription unaccountably fails to remove the ads, which is the main thing I would pay for to begin with.

Netflix will probably never happen in the UK, because of nightmarish licensing laws and contracts – In the US Netflix doesn’t need a deal with anyone to rent physical DVDs, they just buy them and rent them keeping all the profit thanks to American laws and first sale doctrine.

For streaming they can go straight to the companies/content producers themselves and not having to worry about going through whichever channel in the UK bought the TV rights over here.

Shame really if somehow Netflix could broker deals with US TV channels and movie studies to go no restriction worldwide streaming they’d make a fucking fortune and drastically cut piracy.

I mean honestly, I have Sky broadband, full package HD – I have a DVD/bluray rental subscription with love film and I STILL pirate a vast chunk of TV shows and movies – simply because I can get a pirate copy faster, easier and in better quality than any other service, when I want it, how I want it.

It is just insanity that the pirate bay offers the vastly superior service – I am and willing to pay for better legal service, but it doesn’t exist.

I’m sure it would get even more sticky-complicated crossing over to other shores, but they’ve managed to sort out a more limited version of things for Canada. I wouldn’t count it out quite yet. Of course, the British version likely wouldn’t compare to the original, but even the original has to deal with licensing bullshit that drives me up a wall (individual episodes disc-only, rotating content seemingly at random). Someday, someday maybe media companies will figure out this internet thing and how to integrate it properly into their business.

That’s a pretty good list- shame I uninstalled Spotify after they completely gutted how much you could listen to each month with a free account, and still haven’t got pretty much any of the big names like the Beatles, Metallica, Pink Floyd and so on. So not much point in using it when I can rip my own CD collection to mp3 and listen to it without any adverts.

Actually, the volume slider seems to be working now, which confuses me, as I don’t remember updating my Spotify-linux client for a while, and a week or two ago the volume slider didn’t work. Linux Mint 10 x86_64, if you are interested. Shame they don’t still support touch-sensitive media buttons on my laptop, but at least Rhythmbox does that.

Frank Klepacki, the guy who did the music for the Command & Conquer games, has most of his stuff on there, including the game soundtracks. At least I think so. They’re not available in Sweden anymore (even though we came up with the program to begin with!), but some of you might be luckier.

Ooohe Hitman 2 soundtrack, yay. Most would not agree, but Hitman 2 was my favorite of the 4 games (I really liked them all) and this game also had the best soundrack IMO. Thanks for sharing! I just started using Spotify last night and love love it. If only it had .flac support for your local files, then I wouldn’t need anything else… Any tips on how to make this happen? Most of the search results for plug-ins, etc. seemed really shady :/

As one of the few Americans who bothered to sign up for Spotify, I can confirm that about 99% of the tracks listed above generate the following wonderful message: “This track is currently not available in the United States.”

No mention of the Might and Magic VI, VII and VIII and all of the Heroes of Might and Magic soundtracks? Those are the best in gaming by a huge margin. Head and shoulders above any other soundtracks I’ve heard. Rob King and Paul Romero composed them all.

Halo, Prince of Persia, Gears of War, Borderlands, Street Fighter, Hellgate, Scott Pilgrim, several Konami albums, pachinko soundtracks, Age of Empires, Bit.Trip Runner, Fable III and many, so many more:link to open.spotify.com
Including a whole bunch which, sadly, have since been pulled in some regions…

Frustratingly, none of the albums on this list I’d actually be interested in are available in the U.S.

I was a huge fan of Spotify when I first tried it two years ago, and had been waiting for it to hit the States ever since they figured out I wasn’t from the UK. Now that it’s finally available over here, I’m finding that most of what I’d want to listen to isn’t available here, but is on Grooveshark or other services.